paladin Archives - Page 3 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Re-Learning Tankadin

December 21, 2015 by Belghast

Pretty Cow

One of the frustrations of playing Horde side is that as a boosted level 100 character, I am lacking a backlog of awesome gear to use for transmogging purposes. I mean afterall the true “end game” of World of Warcraft is looking fabulous. As a result my down time has been spent running a bunch of older raids so that I can have something in my void storage worth transmogging. Yesterday I finally completed my set of Tier 10 heroic armor from Icecrown, and while I don’t really have a belt that matches it perfectly yet… I am thinking it works pretty well. I am not sure why but I have always loved the “plate dress” look that a few of the sets have, and Judgement is probably my favorite set period. The thing is… a paladin running around in full judgement at this point is somewhat cliche’d so instead I started chasing either the tier 8 set from Ulduar or tier 10 from Icecrown. The problem with Ulduar is that I have run it numerous times and have yet to get the correct arm piece to drop, leaving me with a glaring hole in my armor. Similarly frustrating is that the Tier 8 set does not seem to have a belt that matches it terribly well. The positive about playing a Cow/Worgen/Draenei is that the boot slot doesn’t matter quite so much since there are hooves/paws in the way.

As far as the weapon I really like this spear I picked up in Ulduar, the only problem there is that I just don’t care for the polearm animation. I need to sort out a better two handed sword that matches this set… and honestly I think they are going to similarly come from Ulduar as well. I remember there being some pretty cool blades from there as well. There were cool swords in Alliance Crusader’s Coliseum, but unfortunately all of the horde variants are big axes. I have this very specific style that I am going for with the MooCowAdin… which is polished and civilized. Essentially I am going for the traditional Paladin vibe, not a tribal version of a Paladin. The only thing I wish I had is a better pair of goggles, but alas this character is not an Engineer but instead a Blacksmith. I figured Blacksmith would simply be more useful in the long run, since creating your own gear is pretty great. It is my hope that by Legion I have managed to catch up his tradeskills to the point where I can actually create useful stuff.

The Deep End

Yesterday did not go exactly as planned, and we wound up going out shopping again in the afternoon. The positive however is that I got Indian food… which is always a good thing. The negative is that I once again missed the Star Wars pen and paper game, and most of the Horde side raid in World of Warcraft. I had been working on gearing to be a viable tank, and when we decided more healing was needed… I said I was able. The problem being… that not only have I not tanked in a really long time… I have not tanked as a Paladin in an even longer time. Part of me questions my pushing the Paladin up, when I could have gone with a tank I was much more familiar with like the Deathknight or the Warrior. But in part the Paladin was so that I would have access to dps, tanking and healing in one character… and I figured it might be cool to get some more tanking as one of the other classes under my belt. Druid was also a possibility but honestly… I suck at healing with HoTs and after being so damned used to the Warrior… playing a druid tank feels like a really trimmed down version of it. Similarly… cat dps feels like a really confusing version of a rogue… so honestly I think I made the right call as far as multi-function classes goes.

The challenge is that I did not join the raid until Kilrogg which seems to be one of the more complicated fights. The person I was replacing… was the person who normally tanked the main boss so it was very much a sink or swim situation. I had two big problems… firstly holding aggro off our feral druid was a challenge… and one that I was largely failing. Druids have always had the highest aggro, so holding off of them is a challenge in the best of situations. The complicating factor here is the fact that in order to survive I had to keep from getting stacks of this debuff, and the ability that allows me to do that… is essentially my highest threat attack. So I would have to hold it in reserve just to make sure I had it available at all possible times and then hit it when the attack was incoming because the immunity only lasted three seconds. This ability was essentially both a shield slam and an avoidance buff, and normally when I am tanking something I am spamming it every time it is available. We survived only because Obi is overpowered and managed to solo tank the boss down after I died. On Gorefiend however I was feeling much more in my element, and I think did a far more palatable job of tanking. Nothing like being thrown into the lions den to sort out how to play a class!

Kindle Arrives

December 8, 2015 by Belghast

A New Toy

Sunday I wrote a bit about my troubles with Amazon and shipping recently, and I guess maybe that complaining worked. Not only did I get additional prime subscription time added to my account to appease me, but yesterday mid day my new Amazon Fire 7 inch tablet showed up. As a result I spent a good deal of last night fiddling with it, and I figured I would write a little bit about it as a result. The tablet I am talking about is the one that has been widely advertised as being sold in six packs…. and singles go for only $49.99 so that the marketing can say “under $50 dollars”. Over the recent holiday consumer madness… they were selling the tablet for $34.99 which finally got me to jump on buying one just to see what it is like. I already have owned several android tablets, and even got a used ipad 2 since my wife loved hers so much. After all of that I had pretty much decided I simply was not a “tablet” person. If I have time to use a tablet… I am probably at home and could just play on my PC, PS4, Vita, PS3… you are getting the idea. What I lacked though was a really good device to read on… because the iPad and Android tablets were just too bulk to use in bed comfortably without nodding off every so often and whacking myself in the face.

The first shocker is the size, because really when you think about it… 7 inches sounds like a large size. The tablet as a whole feels more like a large phone… so something along the lines of a Samsung Note and less like a tablet. The build quality is solid, and the device feels nice in your hand… but the plastic back makes it feel a little on the cheap side. Then again this is a tablet that I just paid $34 for… and in the past that would have gotten me some shanzhai reject and not a perfectly viable device. There are some caveats to know going into it. Firstly there is no Google Play store on the device by default, and in theory it is set up in a way to keep directing you at the Amazon ecosystem for music, movies and everything else related. This is good in one aspect, especially if you are a Prime user… since well it has one of the better interfaces for actually watching the free streaming with Prime. The whole lack of Google Play would have potentially been a deal breaker since, as someone already embedded in the Android world… I already own pretty much all of the apps I need to function there and have zero interest in repurchasing them from Amazon. Thankfully I did a bit of research before jumping into this device and apparently it is a relatively trivial experience to load the Play store, it simply involves loading four different android apps on your device in a specific order. Luckily however the above video shows you the appropriate order and provides what seems to be a clean link to the downloads. I personally just downloaded them from my device to save having to try and swap them over through a computer.

It Plays Hearthstone

The other thing that I would really like to do with a tablet is to be able to quickly get into Hearthstone and play it from bed. Previously most of my Android devices simply performed like crap in Hearthstone, with the best possible version being on my Samsung Galaxy S5… and even then it was super sluggish. This device however, took a bit of time initially to boot into Hearthstone and sign into Battle.net the first time, but from that point on I have been able to get in and doing stuff pretty quickly. The interface ends up being a little small, so things like the settings gear can be a bit awkward to click on at first, but the base interface of the game performed smoothly. I played a few games last night, and experienced real issues, and even as multiple effects were firing on screen I didn’t see any noticeable lag. So for my purposes the device passes with flying colors when it comes to gaming. At some point I will throw other games on it and test those out as well, but since I was mostly concerned about running what is normally a fairly intensive mobile game like Hearthstone… that is what I went with first. Please excuse the kinda crappy photo but I wanted to take a photo of me running hearthstone ON the device… which meant taking a photo with my phone since I have not figured out how to do a screenshot on Kindle Fire OS yet and the normal methods from my phone did not work at all.

As far as the other purpose of the device, it also passes with flying colors. Any device can read a book, so that wasn’t really what I was concerned about… so instead I booted into my Marvel Unlimited account and attempted to read some comics. I wanted to see if a full comic page was readable with the small screen size and my less than perfect eyes. I have to say I was pretty happy with the end results, and the slightly strange format as you might expect fits a page size perfectly. Laying in bed last night I read around a dozen or so comics and my eyes never felt like they were being strained. The only time things got awkward is when I needed to read a double panel spread, at which point I had to mostly zoom in and move around the screen to read the panels. These were still awkward as shit on my full sized iPad, so I am not really too shocked about this. These are one of those things that only really works well in a physical book. The next step will be to load the puppy up with books, since right now our Amazon account is loaded up with quite literally thousands of books that I have zero interest in… since my wife and her mother are the primary users of that account. In the past I always preferred reading through Aldiko so I will have to install that and test it out as well. All told though… I am really happy with my $34 purchase… which after using some built up Discover cash back bonus… ended up covering the entire cost.

Best Laid Plans

Last night I had every plan of running a bunch of LFR in the hopes of getting a main hand weapon. However in the middle of piddling around in Tanaan jungle I got a Baleful Armament to drop for me. Unfortunately… it turned into the lowest possible version I could get. That said it is better than nothing and matches the 650 shield that I have as well. I am at the very least “viable” as a tank, though I need to do some stuff to set up my bars. It is my hope that at some point I will get a decent sword and shield to drop in normal that I will roll offspec on. In the meantime I need to get used to tanking as a Paladin, and this at least gives me the ability to run the daily heroic relatively easily for Valor. As to how much pug tanking I will be doing… that is an entirely different question. The main problem with last night however… is that I did not really sleep well Sunday night. So by the time I spent awhile fiddling with the Kindle, my wife suggested that it was bedtime… and for once I agreed. Admittedly I went to bed and continued to play with the Kindle, but sitting on the couch was invoking the most furious of yawns. At the very least tonight I want to run the Black Gate on both characters, in the hopes that Tuesday night LFR is still the best possible time to run it. In theory I should probably do the entire LFR on Belghast in the hopes of getting an upgraded weapon before the Wednesday night normal raid with Jed and crew.

Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.

Hellfire and Horde

November 30, 2015 by Belghast

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult. Really freaking annoying. This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting.. so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world. Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast. Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house. So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon. You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals… so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin. When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling. Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids. I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area. So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side. I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel. I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid. They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people. Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots. So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades. Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being. Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them. The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades… in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had. The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor. More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm. It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it. We just kept pushing forward and making progress. For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall. At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party. The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks. I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid. Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King. I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing. For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days… that is definitely a bad thing. The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind. Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing… good at healing people is a completely different one. In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either. In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to. They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways. I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit. I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing… and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.